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When developing your career, it is important to know who you are now and who you would like to be in the future. This requires sitting down and reflecting on your life, an activity that is often neglected, as its benefits are only visible later in life. We tend to focus on the short-term, the…

A couple of years ago Harvard Business Review published an article about the future of HR, how HR should be less of a support unit, and take on a more central, strategic role. One way this strategic role could be achieved is by using HR data to underline the importance of HR topics and calculate…

Have you ever wondered what learning is and how to measure if it happened sufficiently? You might. But if you didn’t, don’t worry. It’s one of those ubiquitous things in life that just ‘is’. However in specific circumstances it is important to know what learning is. A definition of what learning is and is not,…

Some time ago, I had a chat with a co-worker. His lecture contract ends this year. The department is happy with his performance. He is happy teaching, even though he has a very high teaching load. His performance is great, he is satisfied with his job. Only one factor, unrelated to productivity, is the cause…

I’m co-teaching the course Culture, Engagement, and Connectivity in the master Learning of Organization offered by the school of education and public policy at Northwestern’s University. For the virtual office hour I have been asked about what other social networks exists, those that do not involve humans. While my expertise is within human social networks,…

Uber, the hail riding company, has been criticized for its culture and leadership style. Often the negative anecdotes I hear about working at US companies center around the benefits and performance focus, it’s often the interpersonal relationships that have more far stretching consequences, as Uber helps to illustrate. Working at a performance drive company is…

The slides are available via slideshare. On June 1st I was invited to speak as a panel member at the LELLE conference. The conference was part of the EU funded research project ‘Let’s learn to Learn’ . I titled my talk “How to teach the unknown“. A bit of a mouthful. I introduced the talk…

I have often been confronted by colleagues with the argument that social network analysis is only a method. Over time I became more annoyed with that point. Social network analysis goes beyond this. Yes, it is a method, but it is also a perspective, a framework, with which the world can be analyzed. To underline…

Benchmarking is comparing one’s business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies (Wikipedia) The goal is to measure how well one is doing compared to the industry’s best, to discover why they are the best, and to copy. But in here lies the problem. When you copy a competitors…

Are you dreading to go to work every morning looking forward to your weekend, maybe secretly looking for other jobs? Or do you have the opposite feelings for your work: Looking forward to the daily work challenges, mundane tasks, and colleagues? Most of us are somewhere in the middle, as different tasks need to be…